China state media slams Anthropic’s AI slowdown call as ‘Cold War’ strategy

Delightful news from the frontier. Dario Amodei has published an essay calling for a slower pace of frontier AI development, complete with a three-step framework that includes third-party reviewers — which is the AI equivalent of asking the foxes to slow down while a committee of foxes takes minutes. An essay, incidentally, is not a moratorium. Anthropic has spent years warning that its own products might end the world and years selling them, and nothing in this three-step document proposes changing that arrangement. The brakes go on right after the next funding round, presumably.

And what a coalition. Sam Altman and Elon Musk both backed the slowdown call — the two men most famous for shipping at maximum velocity now agree that everyone should be a bit more careful, possibly starting with everyone else. President Trump dismissed the calls outright, which is at least a consistent position from a man who has never once described patience as a strategy. So the essay has united the people racing to build it, the people racing to build it elsewhere, and the one man with the power to actually do anything about it, who declined.

Then China's state media entered, denouncing the whole affair as a 'Cold War' strategy, which is a bold charge from a state news operation with its own strong opinions about who should win the next decade. This is the same slowdown chorus we noted when governments were pressed on oversight, and it has matured precisely as expected: from alarm to essay to framework, with not one GPU, not one training run and not one dollar actually paused. Three steps, third-party reviewers, and none of them a brake pedal. Everyone gets to look serious. Nothing stops.